Payday 2 2nd annual Christmas event

As the final month of the year rolls around so does another thing, holiday themed game events. A commonplace in payday 2 seasonal events offer players a chance to play a special holiday themed heist, which also unusually rewards the player with a limited time mask only obtainable through the heist.

This years Christmas heist is a particularly interesting one. You are tasked with rescuing Vlad's (a criminally insane contact in the game) alcoholic brother in law from his downed plane and rescue as much of the cocaine he was transporting before the cops get a hold on it. The heist takes place at a logging mill and the evidence of a plane crash is evident, burning fuselage litters the map standing out bright orange from the dark greens and browns of the trees creating a setting that looks straight out of an action movie. The layout of the map is very interesting with multiple viable strategies from holing up in the logging warehouse in a "king of the hill" way, or if your team is fairly fast the trees and rock piles provide ample cover to dodge between. The mission starts with you having to escort the drunk pilot to a safe location and signal the escape chopper before the cops show up, after that it's simply holding off the police while simultaneously trying to recover the scattered boxes of coke in the forest.

Along with the heist this years event came with 4 user designed Christmas masks themed after things like the Grinch and the homicidal robot Santa from the popular show Futurama, and if everyone on your team are all wearing different holiday masks and you play the heist on the hardest difficulty you can search find a special mask or rather beard that's modeled after the producer of the games beard. Everyone was also immediately given a new weapon in the form of the iconic Chicago typewriter tommy gun (think 1940's-1950's era mafia). The gun is fairly decent with medium damage and accuracy and a very large ammo capacity, to balance this the gun has awful stability making very difficult to provide sustained fire unless stability improving modifications are added to the gun.

This years update was definitely a fun one with lots of good new content added and even came paired a long with a payday themed version of "12 days of Christmas" which you can listen to here.